Tales and Imaginings Page 5

  So transcribed as fast as he could. The footsteps of the guard who would collect the answers could be heard in the distance; the trumpets of sunset sounded from the highest towers. He flung down his pen and lit a taper at the oil-lamp to seal his answer into the bamboo tube. In his haste – the cell door was being unlocked – he splashed a drop of molten wax onto the network of script lapped about him, which disappeared in a flick of flame as the door swung open.

  *

  Pillowed upon his unease at having destroyed his clue to the history of the restless bone, So lay peering at the stars from under a broad leaf in the thicket that had been his bedroom the night before. At midnight his eyes still showed, anxious as candleflames among the restless branches; then the bells of a procession were heard, torches could be seen flaring in the arched corridors of the forest, a wide path was being beaten across the bushes, a handsome litter arrived and its aged occupant was handed to the carpet hastily flung to receive his feet. It was the venerable Examiner, come to find So according to the directions the youth had penned where an address was to be written on his bamboo cylinder. ‘My son‚’ he began, signalling a servant to pour out soup for the round-eyed starveling summoned from the bushes, ‘by chance yours was the first paper to be read. Your mode of enquiry strays from the prescribed ways of our ancient culture, but it must be conceded that, just as a wind fresh from the hills finds shortcuts about the city we old inhabitants never happened upon, so your outlandish speculations bring to a close an era of thought. The other answers have been burned unopened, and the appointment is yours. It is one for which your alien learning well equips you, as will be explained to you by the Governor of a certain town on the furthest frontier of the Empire. That town is now your home. The journey takes a year; you start immediately.’

  Leaving his troubled conscience lying in the impression of his body on the fallen leaves, So ran towards the star pointed out to him by the Examiners servants; before the flares and clamour of the retreating procession had faded from the woods his run had been choked to a walk by the brambles; at daybreak he read the scroll of directions he had been given and turned towards the distant snowpeaks; through every stage of tears and aches and cold and scratches he held towards his prize, and in another spring found himself tumbling down a mountain brook into a valley which hung above the endless grey plains of the Barbarians. Not far below him was the little frontier-town, a swallow’s nest in a crook of the great wall that circumscribed the Empire. Where the stream paused and rounded itself into a slowly turning pool, So rested, watching the water’s anxious memories of snow yield to the sunlight and the silence. He slept; he stripped off his weariness and threw it away. And then he jumped up to see his future home. He soon found he was being warmed by the admiration in the eyes of a young girl half hidden among the trees; these eyes told him he was newly strengthened and brown from the mountains, and that the sun was curling in his young beard. Then the eyes vanished, and although So ran forward quickly he found nothing but shadows.

  The forest through which So now had to descend was strangely transected here and there by curving rides that tapered away to nothing or swelled into clearings of geometrical shapes he could not name. He became bewildered, and had to ask his way of gangs of workmen burning out thickets and uprooting trees in the perfecting of some great design; they scarcely understood his dialect, nor he theirs, but they pointed him on to where, finally, a wide hook-shaped clearance brought him down to the forest’s abrupt edge and a road through fields to the town and the Governor’s house.

  When So had presented himself to the Governor, and even before he had been instructed in his duties, his questions were of the bright-eyed shadow he had seen in the ornamental forests above the town. The Governor smiled understandingly; his understanding, So immediately knew, like his serene mellowed white-bearded dignity, was that of the Empire itself, upon the unswerving prow of which he was here the figurehead, clear-eyed over the unruffled seas of Time.

  ‘She is a member of my household,’ he said, ‘and it would be entirely natural for you to fall in love with her, and she with you. No doubt it is already done. She is a delightful child, and the match may well be suitable as we know nothing of her parentage. You are interested in such details? It seems, then, that she and her brother, as very young children, were cast out of the Empire and carried by a servant into exile among the herdsmen of the plains. The brother, mentally enfeebled by what passes for schooling in those regions, was beguiled by dreams of return into stealing a horse one night and attempting the journey. Doubtless he perished; certainly he was never heard of again. The retainer betrayed his trust by dying in some nameless little battle out there, and the girl, still hardly more than a baby, came into the hands of tribesmen bringing tribute to our gate here. If any indication of her birth was sent with her, it never reached us. The curious child plays all day in the spacious woods where you saw her; a few trinkets that came with her she has buried somewhere up there. I have not had the heart to tell her how soon these forests are to be burned down.’

  ‘Why must that be?’ asked So.

  ‘It is part of a vast ceremony to be enacted here; you have been sent to assist in its direction. Come to the window and look at the mountainside above us; observe the disposition of the rides and clearings. At the accession of every Emperor a wooded mountainside, such as this, is designated, a tall slope looking out over the plains of the barbarian horsemen. The forests are prepared, shaped by felling and planting into the form of the ideograph of the Emperor. Then they are burned. Thus once in the lifetime of each Emperor his symbol is imprinted in flame on the clouds, his banner is unfurled across the depths of the shapeless lands beyond the wall that defines his Empire, the remotest shepherd is attained by the brand of our fixed purposes on the flowing skies. And they bring their tribute, in such amounts that the wall has to be levelled across the width of the valley’s mouth to receive it.’

  ‘And what do we give in return?’ asked simple So. The Governor worked with his magnificent eyebrows to comprehend the question. Then he spoke.

  ‘The life of these nomads is a flux and reflux over featureless plains, journeys from nowhere to nowhere; their only scholarship is in such insubstantialities as the endless streaming of clouds over their days and the endless cloudy dreams of their nights. But under their intoxication with the formless lies fear, a loneliness which mounts through the years. Then our firm hand reaches out to them across the unwalled labyrinths of the grasslands; we do not forget them, they cannot wander out of our boundless thought of them; once in a generation, the Empire opens an eye. And a mouth. And their gratitude flows in like a tide.’

  The Governor brought his gaze back from the horizon and concentrated it on So. ‘Your part in all this will be to superintend the removal of the wall, to prepare the storehouses, and finally to oversee the arrival of the treasures. You are not the man I would have chosen for the post; your dialect is largely unintelligible, your knowledge of the Empire seems to be limited to an acquaintance with a few hundred ditches; but it appears you excelled in an examination designed to discover the candidate uniquely suited to dealing with these meaningless folk. Indeed if you had not some natural imperviousness to reality you would never have survived your journey here. I bow before the wisdom of the authorities, and the hedgerow freshness of your eyes. Be my seconder, be my son, in this great matter which will crown my career and exhaust my failing powers; your reward will be my pale flower of the level lands – do you see her coming down the forest track? – this shred of a dream blown in from the unknowable. The Emperor and his Court are on their way here to inspect the tribute, and will arrive in six months’ time. You may then petition for a dowry, a matter in which I cannot help you.’

  During the following days, as So, a newborn horseman, galloped again and again the length of the wall that swung like a bird across the valley, he often saw the girl – Springrice was her name – watching him from a distance. Was it merely curiosity that struggled wi
th her reluctance to leave the still, enchanted forests of childhood? So terrified himself with his swooping passages before her; the wall melted under the hands of ragged hordes tormented by his hoof-beats. The Governor nodded his approval each sunset. At the end of the fifth day he met So with these words: ‘My son, your reward is closer at hand than I foresaw. I have just received word that the Court is making quicker progress than was expected and the Emperor will be here in two months’ time. I have given order for the forests to be fired tonight. The removal of the wall will be completed before the tribesmen reach us, thanks to the energy of the authorities in brandishing such a comet’s tail as yourself over the backs of our workers. Look up at the mountainside – there go the scribes who will write our name on the clouds!’

  Stars were moving up the slopes of dusk above them; already the first torchbearers were spreading out along the fringes of the forest. Springrice came running to meet them with alarm in her eyes, and led the Governor aside. So pretended not to watch. She seemed to be pleading with the Governor, who brushed her aside with a pat on the head and strode off to order affairs in the town. Without hesitation the girl turned to So; it was the first time they had spoken together.

  ‘My treasure is buried up there. I must have it. Someday it will tell me who I am. You love me; are you to be my husband? Get it then. Hurry!’

  ‘Where I first saw you?’ asked So, already on horseback again.

  ‘There, among the roots of a great double-oak, under a flat stone. Ride!’

  So thundered through the town and up the mountain-track. Beads of fire were already threaded along the lower edges of the woods. He drove his horse stumbling in the fading light up the steep rides. By the time he had found the pond he had bathed in, a scorching wind was rushing up the mountainside and bats of flame were flickering through the branches overhead. He dragged the terrified horse towards the twin trunks of the ancient tree, kicked over the stone that lay among its roots, and snatched up the twisted shape of metal underneath. Then fiery mouths opened all around him; the horse was gone, he was running between bellowing thunderclouds, he was lost in the maze of this god-like calligraphy of flame, he was blown at last like a speck of soot out onto the precipices.

  Below, the wind with shouts and blows forged great bars of light. The strangely worked piece of bronze lay in So’s hand.

  *

  It was nearly a month before the plains answered the mountain. Then day by day nine columns of dust grew up into the sky from below the horizon. In the warm evenings So and Springrice would sit on the roof of an ancient tower left half ruined when the great wall was torn away from it, and watch the slow blossoming of these nine gigantic flowers long after the sun had set.

  The tribes began to arrive; first single horsemen who came darting out of the hazy distances to fling down their tribute, a wolf-pelt or an unusual pebble, and galloped away again without a backward glance; then families, small bands of marauders, shabby wandering villages with cats that looked like dogs and dogs that behaved like cats; finally vast encamped hordes, the unnumbered grassland peoples, the shepherd kingdoms coming like flood-tides to cast up such offerings that the masonry wall torn down was replaced by one of treasures. So and his labourers attacked this second wall as fiercely as they had the first; as his men dragged the tribute to the storehouses So tried to list it, but most of the objects were too unfamiliar and outlandish for him even to identify, and his records became a gabble of the nameless, the purposeless and the indecipherable. One curiosity, however, raised an echo in his memory. It was a bone, a shoulder-blade, scratched all over in the script of the Empire, which the nomad who brought it could not read. Through an interpreter So heard this man’s tale: he had gone out one moonlit night to an old battle site to search for the silver links and jewelled clasps which it was said could sometimes be found there; while he was groping among the closed flowers for fingerbones bearing rings, he heard a little sound, and saw, not an arm’s length away, a tooth busily scratching columns of writing onto a flat bone. He held his breath and slowly reached out his cupped hand. The tooth was so absorbed in its task that he was able to grab it, but then it squeezed out between his fingers and jumped like a grasshopper into the undergrowth.

  So took this inscribed bone out of his pocket on his way home that evening. The writing was so small and covered every surface so closely that it was difficult to make out where it began or ended. It told some confused tale of exiles’ journeys, a hidden message, a girl-child – and here a strange phrase caught So’s eye: ‘Love unites the keys to the lock that divides.’ He paused to ponder this, turning the bone in his hands and looking up to where a young and slender moon hung beside the dark outline of Springrice watching him from the top of their ruined tower. He saw her as a woman waiting for him, but when he ran up the stairs he found her a child again, who laughed and jumped to and fro across the great fissures in the stonework, who would not be caught, who vanished into the shadows and then leapt out on him like a cat, knocking the bone out of his hand. Then she came softly to him as he sat bewildered and troubled by regrets, over the chasm full of the sound of rushing water into which had vanished his letter from the other end of the world; she held his hand, and calmed him, and promised to marry him when she was older.

  *

  Although the flowing-in of tribute at last dwindled to a trickle of oddities brought by lame beggars and old madwomen, the great horde did not depart. The Governor could not hide his disquiet from So, as night after night the plain was drunk with singing, and day by day the celebrations and games brought squadrons of horsemen galloping in circuits ever nearer the open valley mouth. The womenfolk of the nomads were absorbed again into the dusty horizons, leaving warriors. So and the Governor saw the inchoate sea of peoples crystallizing under their eyes into an army.

  ‘Is there some doubt troubling the minds of these humble folk as to the legitimacy of our Empire?’ said the Governor, as he and So watched one day what appeared to be the preparation of an onslaught. ‘There was some talk at the time of the accession of the present Emperor … Has some rumour crossed the deserts to disturb the confidence of these simple shepherds in our love, a love as fatherly as Time itself? Look there, a chariot bearing a throne is coming to the centre of their front; it seems the blades of grass own a leader! King Thistle mounts! An attack is imminent. I am going down to stand in the mouth of the valley before them as an embodiment of our ancient authority; that is the only wall that can prevail against the coming wind. Do not offer to accompany me, your appearance would not add to the impression I hope to produce. If I should fail, take your horse and cross the mountain to meet the approaching Court. Warn the Emperor, let him gather his armies; report the climax of my career of service. One personal request; take the girl; such a feather will wing your flight. Travel as brother and sister, for safety and seemliness. No, do not weep. Even if I fail, the Emperor will blow this chaff out of our granary. I give you my seal of office, and my blessing.’

  So, with Springrice behind him, watched from the saddle as the old man walked out of the village and took up his position at the focus of the arc of hostility, straightened his bowed shoulders and gazed across the plains as if they were empty. The army was silent. The horsemen were stringing their bows at leisure, choosing arrows with deliberation; a thousand men were calmly taking aim at the motionless figure before them. No signal was given, but the arrows flocked in one moment, and like a plume of smoke caught by a sudden wind, the Governor ceased to be.

  So and the weeping girl were already riding up the ashes of the forest slopes when the army began to move into the village behind them. That night he cradled her in his arms on the edge of the snowfields, and heard wolves howling from the horizon to the stars. The next day they reached the first of many mountain villages, where the authority of the Governor’s seal procured them food, but nobody believed their story.

  They journeyed on, and at last one evening, from the shelter of a flowering thorn, they could see the l
ights and hear the music of the Court encamped and feasting in the valley below. ‘Perhaps tomorrow you can stop being my brother,’ said Springrice. ‘Perhaps you will become my husband, and then you won’t love me any more because you will discover my defect.’

  So laughed at the idea of her having a defect, but she wept and would not be comforted. ‘What is this terrible defect, my love?’ said So. ‘A mouse-bite? A moth-bite?’

  ‘I have never seen it properly,’ she whispered, crouched against him in the sweet evening breath of the flowers, ‘and of course nobody else has seen it since I was a baby. In the middle of my back there is a mark; it has grown as I grew.’

  ‘Let me look,’ said So. Springrice was very pale. Turning away from him, and undoing the clasp at her throat, she let the robe slip from her shoulders. The dark hair, the smooth skin, so snared and held separate the elements of night and day mingled around them that So felt his heart stop beating. Then she turned her head, and the soft web of darkness swung off her shoulders, revealing a pale twisted mark under the surface of her flesh like the vein in a flawed jewel.